Becoming Quiet

Have you spent years pouring yourself into rooms where pouring made no difference — where every word you offered was turned, eventually, against you? There are some kinds of conversations that take more from you than you have to give. There are some kinds of attention that drain you, no matter how short the exchange.

You are allowed to stop pouring.

This is not silence as a strategy against someone else. This is silence as a kindness to yourself. You are learning to recognize the particular feeling in your chest when something is asking for energy you no longer have to spend. You are learning to notice when an exchange is going to leave you smaller than it found you. And you are letting yourself — one closed door at a time — not enter. You are not withdrawing from life. You are returning to your own life. Quietness is the room where the rest of you finally arrives.

It can feel strange at first. Some part of you may still believe that if you just explained better, or argued more carefully, or stayed in the conversation longer, you could finally be understood. Let yourself be tender with that part. It is a part that loved well. It is a part that tried.

What you are learning now is that not every door has to be answered. Not every accusation has to be met. Not every story told about you has to be set straight by you. Some things can be allowed to pass through, like weather, without lodging in your nervous system.

There was the pouring. There is now the small pause. There will be the steady noticing that the garden you are tending, the friend you are calling back, the meal you are cooking for yourself, the sleep you are finally getting — those small bright things can only grow in the space you save by not spending yourself on the storm. Every saved breath is a small kept light. Every closed door is a place the weather cannot reach.

The less you give to what depletes you, the more there is of you to give to what loves you back.